ROME (CNS): A conference on creating partnerships between government and faith-based organisations to fight HIV and AIDS, particularly among children, turned into something of a rally for a more just global distribution of wealth, health and technology.
Sponsored by the United States Embassy to the Holy See and Caritas Internationalis, the October 14-16 conference brought together dozens of Catholic religious and lay organisations providing care to people with AIDS, along with representatives from governments, the United Nations and some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical houses.
Lesley-Anne Knight, who is secretary-general of Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican-based umbrella organisation for Catholic charities, said the fact that “800 children in Africa die every day from AIDS-related illnesses” was “a terrible tragedy, but it is also a scandal”.
Ms Knight said it was a scandal “because we can do something about it”.
Reliable tests existed for knowing whether a pregnant woman was HIV-positive, therapies existed for drastically reducing her chances of transmitting the virus to her baby and tests existed for determining if an infant has the virus and needs treatment, she said.
But in the poorer countries of the world, too many mothers go untested and too few children receive special pediatric AIDS drugs if they get any treatment at all, she said.
US ambassador to the Vatican Miguel Diaz opened the conference by invoking the example of the newly canonised St Damien of Molokai, who not only provided spiritual care for people with leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, but also provided medical care and built homes for them.
The ambassador said the conference could help participants “further Fr Damien’s work of compassion and assistance to vulnerable people”.
A partnership between the US Government and Catholic organisations was essential, he said, since “the United States is the largest donor of global aid (and) the Church is the world’s largest aid-delivery organisation”.
Dr Giuseppe Profiti, who is president of the Vatican-related Bambino Gesu Children’s Hospital in Rome, told the conference that HIV and AIDS was “a global pediatric catastrophe”, with 2 million children living with the virus, 370,000 children newly infected each year, and 270,000 dying each year of AIDS or AIDS-related illnesses – almost all of them in the world’s poorer countries.
UNAIDS executive director Mich-el Sidibe told conference participants that “nothing could be more noble” than saving mothers and their babies.
While co-ordinating the anti-AIDS programs of the various United Nations agencies and building partnerships with local prevention and treatment programs are a key part of Mr Sidibe’s job, he also campaigns for universal access to HIV testing and AIDS treatment.
Where HIV testing was used and mothers were treated before delivery, he said, the number of babies born HIV-positive was extremely low, so with an expansion of testing and treatment “in a few years we can consign to history the heartbreak of babies born infected”.
“Ending the era of children born with HIV is an exciting possibility,” Mr Sibide said, while “failure would be an injustice of our own doing.”
While many of the conference participants gratefully acknowledged support received from the US Global AIDS Program at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, they also shared concrete problems they said the program did not address.
For example, a member of the Medical Missionaries of Mary said their program received AIDS test kits from the program for free, but sometimes could not afford to buy fuel for the truck to get the blood samples to the laboratory.
